Peter Bishop, ably assisted by the team at Design Council Cabe, has produced an excellent report. We will comment on the detail and stimulate some more debate over the next few days. But one thing stands out clearly because it chimes with everything else we have been saying over the last few weeks: It is up to all of us.

With scarce public resources we cannot expect a Design Review system to make up for developers and their professional advisers getting it wrong. So let’s get it right. This is one strand of the Building a Better Britain Campaign: responsible developers will recognise the importance of good design and aim to achieve it. Is that wishful thinking on past performance? Maybe but the future cannot be like the past. It is perhaps no coincidence that the report comes the day after the NPPF consultation closed. To win the pro-development, pro-growth argument we (the industry) will have to make the case in every locality. New buildings should be something of which every place can be proud. Much as I like the occasional National Trust cream tea I shudder to imagine a world in which twee chintz has to be the design solution of choice.

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(n) A ubiquitous concept based on the odd assumption that people, on visiting one park, will want to move directly on to several more in sequence, provided they are linked by tree lined streets. Believed to be derived from observation of mating voles, but not of any obvious known human behaviour. Nevertheless they provide enjoyment, and employment, for green minded planners, and create attractive images on maps. No green chain has been known to have been identified in the real world

The latest product from the BIS ‘RAGPAG’ or Random Growth Policy Acronym Generator. Usefully, provided the name is impressive enough, there is no requirement for a policy thus generated to ‘do what it says on the tin’ or indeed to have any practical realworld value at all. See also Enterprise Zones.

A slightly silly name (how can a gateway be 40 miles long ?) for a blameless and still largely unknown part of the south east where the standard of living is shockingly below the rest of the region for a surprisingly large proportion of the 1.5m population, and which, with thoughtful long term planning and investment could become a much better and more attractive place to live and relieve the development pressure on other more congested locations elsewhere; but which had the misfortune to become a focus of Government action, and a battleground between ill informed brownfield romantics, development fetishists, regeneration fantasists and disaster junkies.

A collection of residential blocks even more tightly packed than usual, and generally to be found in improbable locations hitherto deemed unfit for human habitation (cf Millennium Village, Olympic Village)